Five (Almost) Redeeming Stories from 2013

There are ways in which this has been a rotten year: war and sadness all around, along with things like a broken health-care Web site, and the typhoon that hit the Philippines. The Edward Snowden revelations have had the virtue of starting an international conversation and making one feel a little good about investigative journalism—but when one thinks about privacy and secret courts and one’s sad faith that an e-mail to a loved one might be private, it all gets dispiriting. But then there are moments that are almost—maybe—a little bit redeeming. Here are five; please tell me about any others.

1. Malala Yousafzai, victorious. The year began with Malala in the hospital, almost three months after an assassin sent by the Pakistani Taliban shot her in the head, because she thought girls should go to school. Doctors were still working to put her skull back together. She spent her sixteenth birthday, in October, addressing the United Nations; that same month, she silenced Jon Stewart when she told him how, given the chance, she would tell off a Talib, and laughed at Prince Philip’s jokes at a reception at Buckingham Palace, where she gave Queen Elizabeth a copy of her new book. Maybe she could have won the Nobel Prize; who says she won’t, and perhaps for realizing plans she hasn’t told anyone about yet. This is a girl who can still stun us.

2. Pope Francis, merciful and militant. Embracing a man who was covered with bulbous tumors; asking whether he is one to judge homosexual priests; talking about the “tyranny” capitalism can construct—which is the most radical act? Francis’s papacy, only nine months old, is transfixing, and perhaps, for the Church, transfiguring. How did the cardinals ever choose him?

3. Three women in Cleveland, survivors. “I’m Amanda Berry,” a woman said in a call to 911 on May 6th. “I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for ten years, and I’m, I’m here, I’m free now.” She hadn’t given up, and neither had the two women imprisoned in a house in Cleveland with her. That day, Berry had pushed her arm through a screen door in a house where they had been raped, beaten, and abused for years. She got the attention of some neighbors; she got herself and the others out of there.

4. Edith Windsor, married. On June 26th, Windsor won a case she’d brought to the Supreme Court, asking that the federal government recognize her for the widow she was—the case involved the inheritance tax—and the wife she had been. Her victory overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, which ordered the federal government to ignore same-sex marriages like Windsor’s. Thea Spyer had proposed to her in 1967; they had married in 2007, when Spyer was dying of multiple sclerosis. She had been in a wheelchair, and Windsor had cared for her, for years; Ariel Levy’s Profile of Windsor is called “The Perfect Wife,” and rightly so. The Court couldn’t consecrate Windsor’s marriage more than she had with her love, but it could give the union its legal due—and the rest of us a chance to celebrate it.

5. Nelson Mandela, free. We shared almost all of 2013 with Nelson Mandela—whose presence has helped redeem many years. He almost died this summer, with camera crews camped around his hospital; he fought his way home, where he passed Thursday, as quietly as a man could when the world had been poised to mourn him for so long. Mandela had been prepared, too. In 1964, when he was convicted on the capital charge of sabotage, he told the judge that he was ready to die for his ideals. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and, during his twenty-seven-year burial, put to work in a limestone quarry where the dust hurt his eyes, and where he contracted tuberculosis that scarred his lungs. A lung infection is what finally helped kill him, at the age of ninety-five, almost a quarter century after his release. In that sense alone, his captors broke something in his body. They never touched his spirit.

Photograph by Olivia Harris/Reuters.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.